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Daily Archives: May 10, 2012

Lake Joondalup is more of a wetlands than a lake as such, and is certainly not deep. Barely a metre. It’s one of a chain of remaining wetlands that once ran down parallel to the coast, and includes Hyde Park which, unlike the others (Lake Monger, Herdsman Lake) was transformed in the 1900’s into an ‘ornamental’ park. Only the ponds remain there. Lake Joondalup, like Herdsman lake – & Lake Monger, is a refuge for water birds, and until recently, this lake was dry. Herdsman Lake, despite being a wildlife refuge, is suffering from too much development. lake Monger, for the moment, despite being in a heavily built up area, us safe, and has been somewhat landscaped. Lake Joondalup is the wildest of all of them, though the bush surrounding it is not very deep at all.

I was hoping to see the black cockatoos which a friend told me are here, but saw none. All we saw were ibis & ducks apart from the 2 heron (there were more) that I managed to photograph.

It’s such a vast space that I really felt the limitations of my little point-and-shoot camera. It didn’t have enough zoom 😦

The water was incredibly still and the lake is fringed by reed beds which are throughout the space where the water should be.

In areas where there were no reeds, the fringing bush (mostly paperbark from what I could see) were reflected in the water. the light was weird, changing from cloudy and cool to abruptly sunny & humid and a wee bit unpleasant.

After we had a little picnic on the western-ish side of the lake, we walked and then drive around to the eastern side. From here, a smoke haze from a bushfire further north was visible and we could smell the smoke.

And here, behind where we had out picnic, a sea of roofs across the waters of the lake:

These are looking north, into the smoke haze.

Next post: trees, but I’ll leave that for tomorrow. I am thinking it is possibly worth returning. There is a lake in the grounds of the university…

🙂

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Today, I went a long way out of MtLawleyShire. All the way to main campus of Edith Cown University at Joondalup, around 30 minutes north of Perth on the freeway. I attend the Mt Lawley (& smaller) campus of the university, and have only ever been out here once before, a few years ago. Joondalup also has a ‘lake’ – even when full it’s barely a metre deep, and at the moment, despite some rain over the last week, it’s far from full.

A friend and I went up to the University, then took a picnic lunch down to the lake, then walked a way around it through paperbark and banksia forests. There’d been a big fire there a couple of years ago, so it probably wasn’t as thick as it normally would be. It explains why so many of the banksias were tall and thin rath that old and spread.

I took an awful lot of photos so I’m splitting the post up into #1 Flowers, #2 Lake, #3 Trees. There might be more, but that’s it for the moment.

First, the flowers. These are mostly taken in the grounds of the university which has all native species and all Western Australian. And beautiful.

Grevillea. These were flowering in the gardens outside the University library. The yellow-pink ones are absolutely lovely, but I still love the scarlet ones as well. They, like the banksia, were thick with bees, but even more – these still had water droplets from the morning’s rain.

Banksias. I think they’re Banksia Prionotes. In the next post (or the one after – remember, there are at least 3 posts from my day trip), there are photos of the banksia forest, but the flowers in those aren’t close up. These were in the gardens of the university. There’s a bee on the main flower 🙂

Even when old, when the flower has left nothing but the core, they’re fairly spectactular:

The brilliant soft red of a miniature bottlebrush:

Technically, this is a flower – but of fungus. It was growing on a stump of a tree on our walk.

Many of the trees were in blossom, but most were out of reach of both me & my little camera. These were the only 2 I could get, and one of them’s a little fuzzier than it should be 🙂